Bruising running back led the Washington franchise to its first Super Bowl victory after the 1982 season. The team will retire his No. 44 on Nov. 8.
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In the latest attempt by the Washington Commanders’ new owners to embrace the team’s glory years, the franchise announced on Thursday that it will retire John Riggins’s No. 44 at halftime of their Nov. 8 game against the Los Angeles Rams.
“There are certain players whose impact goes far beyond statistics, championships and accolades; they become woven into the fabric of the franchise. John Riggins is one of those players,” Commanders managing partner Josh Harris said in a statement released by the team.
Left unsaid was the fact that no figure in the franchise’s history may better represent its chaotic rise and fall over the past half century than the 76-year-old running back turned actor who would later perform Shakespeare on Broadway.
Through the end of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, Riggins was one of football’s most-dominant backs, at times literally carrying Washington to a Super Bowl championship. Then in retirement he became a constant critic of then-team owner Daniel Snyder, blaming him for the organization’s trouble-filled descent this century in a way many of its former stars would not.
“I like to say that in the years 1982, ’83 and ’84 we were a team of characters with character and when it came to characters John was in a very subtle way the character of characters,” Riggins’s longtime teammate, quarterback Joe Theismann, said Thursday by phone from Lake Tahoe, California, during a break in the American Century Championship golf tournament.
There are plenty of football reasons Washington will make Riggins’s No. 44 the seventh number officially retired by the team along with Darrell Green’s 28, Art Monk’s 81, Sean Taylor’s 21, Sonny Jurgensen’s 9, Bobby Mitchell’s 49 and Sammy Baugh’s 33. He rushed for 11,352 yards in his career — 7,472 of them for Washington — and had 104 rushing touchdowns.
Originally a fullback when he was drafted by the New York Jets in 1971, he developed into a bruising, relentless running back in Coach Joe Gibbs’s offense in Washington, rushing for more than 1,000 yards four times with the team and probably would have a fifth year if not for a labor dispute between the NFL’s players and owners that limited him to just eight games in 1982. But he led the team to the Super Bowl that season, rushing for 166 yards in a 27-17 victory over Miami in Super Bowl XVII. He was named Super Bowl MVP.
Theismann remembers Gibbs telling the players the night before the Super Bowl that as long as they could stay within a score of the faster Dolphins, he believed Riggins could wear them down behind Washington’s stout offensive line.
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“We managed to ride him to a championship,” Theismann said.
In 1983, at 34, an age when most running backs are deep in decline, the 6-foot-2, 230-pound Riggins ran for 1,347 yards and a league-leading 24 touchdowns. The next year he had 1,239 yards and 14 touchdowns. He was named to the NFL’s 1980’s All-Decade Team and inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1992.
“When a lot of people thought about JR they didn’t think about speed, they just thought about power,” Theismann said. “But he was really fast, too. John could run to the outside and not just up the middle. He could just string a defense out and then use his power and speed to break through an opening.”
And yet it was the Riggins off the field that has endeared him to Washington fans. He was part of the team’s famous Five O’Clock Club, an old shed on the practice field grounds where he and the offensive linemen went to sip beers after practice. He was always the one with the dry quote, once ending a year-long holdout over his contract by telling reporters, “I’m bored, I’m broke and I’m back.”
Perhaps his most famous incident came when he attended the National Press Club dinner in 1985 and was placed at a table with Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, astronaut John Glenn and Virginia Gov. Charles Robb. Several news accounts at the time reported that Riggins drank heavily and then told O’Connor: “Come on Sandy baby, loosen up. You’re too tight.”
Riggins never denied the incident and later explained it away in several interviews as feeling nervous about being in such an important setting.
For a time, Riggins tried acting, then he returned to the Washington area in the early 2000s to talk about football on sports radio. With Synder overseeing the Washington franchise’s collapse into chaos, Riggins did not hold back with his fire.
“This franchise has been taken over by someone who has the mindset of a child,” he said at a WTOP town hall.
“This is a bad guy that owns this team,” he said on a Showtime appearance.
For many years, he stayed away from Washington games. Even after moving to a radio station owned by Snyder in 2016 he remained an independent voice. It’s only been in the last couple of seasons, after Harris’s group bought the team, that he has returned to games at the Northwest Stadium.
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“I’m glad JR is getting his due,” Theismann, said. “It’s so long overdue.”
